Page 1 of So Wrong It Must Be Right

Chapter 1

“You’re not still emailing with that guy!”

Dinah looked up from her phone and blinked at her cousin. It took a minute to get her bearings and remember that Kayla was waiting on her to get started.

“Actually I was reading up on Trask. I found an article that might explain his reluctance to sell.”

Kayla snatched Dinah’s phone away, then frowned at the screen. “It is sick that you get the same look on your face reading those pervy emails as you do reading stuff for work.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dinah replied primly. Okay, maybe she did know what Kayla meant, and maybe it was a little sick, but Gallagher’s Tap Room was Dinah’s blood. The Gallagher family had moved to St. Louis over a century ago, and built a little pub on the very land beneath the concrete floor under her feet. It was everything to her, and yeah, she got a little excited about that.

Kayla gestured toward the back door and Dinah stood to follow. Meeting with Trask was going to be the moment she finally proved to Uncle Craig and the board she was ready to take over as director of operations.

Being Uncle Craig’s “special assistant” had turned out to mean little more than being his bitch, and while she’d worked to be the best damn bitch she could be, she was ready for tradition to take over. From the very beginning, the eldest Gallagher in every generation took over. These days, the title was director of operations, but it was all the same. And she was the eldest Gallagher of the eldest Gallagher. She’d been told her whole life Gallagher’s would be hers when her father retired, or, as it turned out to be with Dad, abandoned everyone and everything in the pursuit of his midlife crisis.

It was time. Dinah was ready, and getting some crazy urban farmer to sell his land next to Gallagher’s for the expansion was going to be the final point in her favor. No one would be able to deny she was ready.

Director of operations was everything she’d been dreaming about since she was old enough to understand what the job required. Long after she’d understood what Gallagher’s meant to her family, and to her.

“So, you finally stopped emailing creepy Internet dude?”

Dinah walked with Kayla down the hallway to the back exit. “He’s not creepy.” The guy she’d randomly started emailing with, after she’d tipsily commented on his Tumblr page one night, wasn’t creepy. He was kind of amazing.

“Dinah.”

“I’m sorry. No way I’m giving that guy up. It’s some of the hottest sex I’ve ever had.”

Dinah thought wistfully about how he’d ended his last email.And when you’re at the point you don’t think you can come again, I’ll make sure that you do.It might be only through a computer, but it was far superior to anything any other guy had ever said to her.

“It’s fictional.”

“So?”

“He’s probably like a sixty-year-old perv. Or a woman, if he’s really as good as you say he is.”

“As you pointed out, it’s fictional. Who cares?”

They stepped out into the lingering warmth of late September. The urban landscape around Gallagher’s was a mix of old and new, crumbling and modern. Soon, Gallagher’s was going to make sure the entire block was a testament to a city that could reinvent itself.

“What does he do, send you pictures of models? Oh, baby, check out my six-pack. Then suddenly he’s claiming to be David Gandy.”

“We don’t trade pictures of each other or any personal information that might identify us. I mean, he knows I have freckles. I know he has a birthmark on his inner thigh, but that’s about it. It is pure, harmless, sexy sexy words.”

“Geez.” Kayla waved her phone in front of Dinah’s face, the screen displaying a myriad of apps. “Not even Snapchat?”

“Nope. It’s all very old-fashioned. Like Jane Austen. OrYou’ve Got Mail.Only with sex stuff.”

“Go have some real sex, Dinah.”

“I do that too!” Although admittedly less and less. Maybe not for six months or so. Trying to prove herself to Uncle Craig was eating her life away, and the nice thing about a sexy email was she could read it whenever she wanted and didn’t have to remember its birthday or cook it dinner. It was perfect really, except the whole do-it-yourself aspect.

But do-it-yourself had been instilled in her from a young age, no matter how false the message rang in her adulthood.

The tract of land behind Gallagher’s that Uncle Craig wanted to buy was a strange sight in downtown St. Louis. Between one empty lot Uncle Craig had already bought, and an aging home with a scraggly yard that Craig was also after, a land of green emerged.

Not even green grass, but huge plants, archways covered in leaves, rows and rows of produce-bearing stems. So much green stuff the crumbling brick exterior of the old house behind it all was barely visible from where they stood in front of the chain-link fence that enclosed the property.

“It’s cute,” Kayla observed from their vantage point on the cracked sidewalk. “Kind of funny we’re trying to get him to sell it so we can pave over it and then have a farmers’ market.”

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